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The lawyer Alexánder Sánchez enthused José Ignacio Penagos, director of IMF Noticias, because in an article they would have branded him as the man who “exploded” the EPM legal affairs office, in the midst of the billionaire lawsuit against the project’s designers and builders Hidroituango.
According to the “confidential” section of IFM Noticias, a portal focused on Antioquia, the lawyer Alexánder Sánchez Pérez, vice president of legal affairs of Empresas Públicas de Medellín (EPM), would be the bone of contention in the midst of the billionaire lawsuit that The entity advances against the contractors of Hidroituango, the hydroelectric project that in 2018 almost collapsed due to the plugging of one of its tunnels. However, the seasoned lawyer, who is even a doctor of law, filed a tutela action against the director of the medium, José Ignacio Penagos, as it would have violated his “honor, dignity and good name.”
Also read: Administrative Court of Antioquia rejects EPM’s lawsuit for Hidroituango and asks for corrections
The genesis of the discord between the web portal and the renowned lawyer has its own name: the lawsuit for $ 9.9 billion with which EPM seeks to compensate the economic blows suffered after the emergency in Hidroituango that, according to the Comptroller’s Office, in a 2019 report , it will take 35 years to be profitable. IFM Noticias maintains that the lawyer Alexánder Sánchez Pérez, who took charge of the billionaire lawsuit in June 2020, “entered a war” with other lawyers that EPM has at its service and, even, would have hired “expensive law firms in Bogotá ”, to do a task that“ they had always handled from the legal team ”.
“It was a cruelty to discredit me,” replied the lawyer Sánchez Pérez in the document known to El Espectador. That was the conclusion he reached on March 2, when, according to his account, he typed his name into Google and saw that the Penagos portal had launched the note “EPM’s Vice-presidency of legal affairs exploded.” Now, via tutelage, the vice president wants IFM Noticias to rectify the information it provided and, likewise, to write a new note in which it is explained that the media provided “misleading” data. And not only that, Sánchez Pérez asked that the guardianship judge send the folders to the Prosecutor’s Office, so that Penagos be investigated for alleged slander.
“It is about [con la tutela] to avert the imminent danger that hangs over my life from what was expressed in the publication, where I am presented to public opinion as an instigator of Antioquia politics, with the convulsion and animosity that such a saying can generate and the hatred , ill will and animosity that can be aroused against me and my family ”, explained the vice president of legal affairs at EPM. According to the note on the portal, the lawyer came “by political recommendation” to the billionaire lawsuit and, furthermore, his objective would be “to get all the mayors of the past to get involved” and for “the builders to stay out of EMP.”
It may interest you: Two years have passed since the emergency in Hidroituango
The internal fights due to the emergency in Hidroituango, which at the time forced the evacuation of 25,000 people from the region, have been so serious that, in August of last year, eight members of the EPM Board of Directors resigned their position, after the mayor of Medellín, Daniel Quintero, announced the billionaire lawsuit against the contractors. While the officials said that they had not been taken into account, the Medellín Mayor’s Office explained that there was no time to present the claim to the Board of Directors and that the deadline for a possible conciliation between EPM and the contractors was about to expire. : two years, starting in 2018.
In fact, the renowned lawyer Alexánder Sánchez Pérez was hired to take on the billionaire lawsuit in June 2020, with the minute hand representing a real headache. “In effect, I was given the task of examining countless files related to this case, with the aggravation that, in the light of the most conservative and least risky position for the company to recover its resources, the shares would soon expire,” he explained in guardianship. And among the actions was the possible conciliation, before filing the billionaire lawsuit, which in the end never occurred between EPM and the Hidroituango contractors.
During the process, despite what IFM Noticias exposed, Sánchez Pérez says that he looked for a team to draft the lawsuit, which was reasonable with the public budget, but he came across lawyers who even charged him $ 50,000 million. In the end, as it was consigned in the guardianship, he found a group of six people, whose services cost $ 700 million, of which “EPM has only disbursed $ 100 million up to now.” Among those chosen is, for example, Carlos Alberto Chinchilla, who has a doctorate in Contract Law from the University of Genoa (Italy) and a professor of Civil Law at the Externado University.
Also read: EPM filed the lawsuits for $ 9.9 billion against the consortia involved in Hidroituango
On January 12, Sánchez Pérez’s team filed the expected lawsuit against Hidroituango’s contractors. However, the Administrative Court of Antioquia returned it to him and gave him ten days to make corrections and resubmit it. Meanwhile, the Comptroller’s Office is tracking the contractors and public officials involved in the project, which is supposed to generate 17% of the country’s energy. On December 3, 2020, the control body charged 28 natural and legal persons, among whom are the Governor of Antioquia, Aníbal Gaviria, today captured for an infrastructure contract, and Sergio Fajardo, former governor of that department and presidential candidate in 2018.
José Ignacio Penagos, for his part, responded to the guardianship on March 6, stating that Sánchez Pérez “seeks to pressure and intimidate the judge and the portal by presenting not arguments, but by recalling his career and titles so as to generate the idea that he It is above the law and that special perks must be had by reason of having been a magistrate. It is a kind of additional chapter to those that journalists have already denounced about ‘you don’t know who I am’, but we are not intimidated by an official who seems to be seeking with this tutelage, is to divert attention from the serious complaints he has for his irregular handling ”.
On the other hand, among the contractors of Hidroituango, to whom the Comptroller put the magnifying glass, is the CCCI Ituango Consortium, made up of Construções e Comercio Camargo Correa SA, Constructora Conconcreto SA and Coninsa Ramon H SA, which is investigated for alleged systematic delays in the construction of the works and elaboration defects in the Auxiliary Deviation Gallery (GAD). The GAD was precisely the epicenter of the problem, since the plugging of one of its tunnels caused the level of the reservoir to rise, which caused the flooding of roads and even the collapse of the Pescadero bridge. “There was a patrimonial detriment of $ 2.9 trillion,” concluded the Comptroller’s Office.
